


I Guess the Fortune Teller's Right

by irolltwenties (Shenanigans)



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, they started this, they talked about "chad" okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 08:39:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18362489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shenanigans/pseuds/irolltwenties
Summary: Maria DeLuca is her own damn hero- even if she doesn't want to be.





	I Guess the Fortune Teller's Right

Maria DeLuca buried her best friend on a Wednesday, watched her sister drive away on a Tuesday, and realized she was completely alone now on a Friday. She never felt right in June anyway- might have been the way Mercury was transversing, but June never quite felt like hope to the girl who stayed behind. It was like listening to Natalie Imbruglia sing the EdnaSwap song, saccharine and not quite the right tone- missing that undercurrent of real pain.

She thinks she was distracted pretending to be okay. She figures it was the starlight and the underage drinking mixed with the shitty mexican skunk weed that made Chad seem like a good idea. He was tall with broad shoulders and thick wrists that she liked to try and wrap her fingers around. He had that classic crooked smile and seemed so simple: a pretty song without a hook. She liked his tanlines and the way her name sounded on his tongue. He’d been visiting from Conneticut, crisping red and peeling at first, hair going lighter until it seemed cornsilk white at the tips. She liked the way he would sing Sheryl Crowe at her unironically before driving away in his Subaru. 

“Fucking foreign car,” she’d whisper to herself with a shake of the head. “He’s really not from around here.”

‘What’s with Dawson’s Creek, DeLuca,” Hank would ask, sneering at the way she hummed as she wiped down the tables. He’d been picking up the band equipment from the first Ranchero night that they’d actually gotten some smatterings of applause. 

“None of your business,” she’d replied, sighing and picking up the cocktail napkins from where they huddled under the booth, corralled there by the little bit of breeze that kicked up each time the door opened. She spent the next ten minutes moving from table to table, stacking the empty glasses in her palm, wiping and sanitizing the table tops, and removing the darts from where ever they’d landed. She was always slightly impressed at the blunt tips wedged precisely in the exposed brick. 

Chad kissed her like she wasn’t a secret, big hands making her face feel so small. He cupped her between his palms and bent down to taste her, smiling into the way he seemed to swallow the vowels in her name. He liked that some nights she’d just find him out near the motel he was staying at during the summer. “Just like that,” he’d breathe as she hitched her skirt up to straddle his thighs, daring more than she’d ever thought to just be someone worth staying for.

Her mother started forgetting where she’d put the hair dryer that summer. Maria would find it in the freezer or tucked neatly under the wrong sink. They lived in a small two bedroom apartment above the Wild Pony. The kitchen was above the back bar, the smell of fried foods seemed to permeate everything she owned. She would burn Nag Champa and let it sink into her skin and her crystals as she opened the window above the back dock. The moon seemed so full on these hot summer nights, the breeze of her air-conditioner blushing her hair outward towards the night sky. Maria said a little prayer for Rosa. She sang a song for Liz. She cried for Alex. Maria did things in threes, sacred number for the sacred people in her life. 

“Will said we’ll make it through, he’s just got to stop at the base.” He mother was stirring mac and cheese, the smell like childhood- orange and savory. Mimi had started talking about Will like they were close friends and Maria had just grinned, liking that her mother was so imaginative. They’d talked about Chad openly, and her Mom had just offered to read the cards.

“No,” Maria had replied, tongue tucked against her top lip and impish with the sort of surety that only comes with realizing love had come up quick and rabbit hearted. “Let me enjoy the surprise.”

Maria always read the cards now, at least once a day. She never made the same mistake twice.

She wrote Alex long letters that rambled about the people back home. She included poems and star charts. He would send her back post cards with short answers and little bits of half truths. He knew better than to lie to a psychic, but she missed the way he’d leaned against her bed that night, head tilted back and eyes closed. She’d loved the way he’d felt so warm and open, loose limbed and liquid hearted like she could push her fingers into his skin and settle to soak like a warm bath. Liz never wrote back, but she sent one poloroid of the moon over the atlantic. It felt empty and lost. Maria tucked it into her scrapbook, painting small hearts around it like she could just magic Liz whole again.

Chad didn’t care that she was the weird kid in school. He didn’t care that she talked about crystals and rising signs (he was a capricorn with leo rising- had to be with that wild blond hair and strange need to face all his bills in his battered wallet). He didn’t mind that she forgot to shave sometimes, just running his palm over her prickly calves with a laugh, eyes going darker as he turned his thumb to stroke *higher*. “Hippy,” he’d whisper right before touching the wet of her.

“Wasp,” she’d exhaled like a sigh, knees sliding a little farther apart. She made room for him in her life, in *her*.

She hated herself for believing that maybe he’d stay. She hated herself more for letting him back in every time he came back. She hated the way her moan broke out of her when he swung her up around his hips with a happy smile the next June. She’d been taking some classes at the local community college, but mostly just working the bar at night. She could count a perfect six pour and knew how to spot a fake from thirty states. She knew better than to give someone a ten as change when they were more likely to leave a five and pocket the ten with no tip. She knew exactly where the five different whiskeys were stored and could reach for each without looking. She cleaned the well. She cleaned the restrooms. She failed Calc. She failed Stats, but aced the fuck out of her Cultural Anthro class. 

She hated that later that night when she pushed up to press his wrists back into the sheets he looked at her like she was something *haunting*. Chad looked at her like she was something he’d *missed* when she started to roll her hips his name on her lips. He’d upgraded to a Toyota and she noticed the greek stickers on the back window, the tassle hanging from the rearview. She bought him a bracelet studded with turquoise. It stained his pale skin green, but he wore it anyway.

Liz was living somewhere outside of Pittsburg; she’d throw her an email some nights, rambling and never quite touching the kind of pain that sat between them- the shared grief. Maria just wrote her back and told her about the weather. They didn’t talk about anything important anymore. Alex graduated from the Academy, stopping home long enough to have a drink too many and cry once on her shoulder. They sat shoulder to shoulder on the hood of his Ford, staring at the way the horizon was going silver-light, touching the mesquite and sage brush black before staining the sky lavender then pink. “Where are you going next?” she’d finally asked, putting her head on his shoulder and lacing their fingers together.

“I think they’re sending me to Germany first.” He coughed, voice low and deep as the sun started pulling itself over the edge of the mesa. “After that? I just want to get away.”

“You’ll visit?” Maria asked, running a thumb over his knuckles. “They let you guys do that, you know.”

He’d smiled and nodded against her hair. She knew he was lying. She let him.

Chad looked stupid with his hair flopping the wrong way over his perfect part, glasses shoved onto his face and boxers just a little too low on his hips, but it was Maria’s kind of stupid. Her hair was wrecked, lion’s mane around her head and she rolled to burrito herself in the sheets that smelled like old spice, sex, and the lingering sweetness of her incense. “I was thinking,” he started.

“Always a dangerous thing, babe,” she replied, grinning as she snagged her rings off the nightstand. 

He rolled his eyes and scratched at his stomach, shifting from foot to foot. “Why don’t you come visit me.” She’s pretty sure he meant it as a question, but it sounded like a statement, like he’d decided that she should just be with him up North.

She blinked, crease collecting absently between her brows as she frowned at him. Her mother had started wandering at night- she’d just taken it as insomnia until the morning Mimi had come home with no shoes, feet bloody and scratches across her cheek. She’d been so lost she didn’t recognize Maria at first, feeling her way into the Pony like she was lost for days instead of hours. She’d been watching her mother fade away, ignoring it and hoping that maybe it wasn’t as bad as she thought- seeing the smile slip sideways into wonder. Watching her mother forget the words to the song she was singing and then blink out at the crowd in confusion.

“You could work at a bar up there,” he continued. “It’d be great money.”

“I can’t leave, babe.”

“If this is one of those can’t transplant a deser-”

“Drop it, Chad.”

He’d did and she never let herself feel the moment it ended between them. The stars had been so beautiful the night he’d said goodbye. 

Sometimes Michael Geurin would sneak into the Pony and drink until he found someone to hit him. She hated that she understood that feeling. She hated that when he’d be laughing and bloody, lip or brow split with that wild reckless smile as he threw himself back into the brawl with a strangled cry- she *understood* him. She understood that sometimes it was better to feel beaten than broken. He would breath heavy and ragged, picking his fists up and squaring off against the shadows that haunted him. He was a heavy presence, weighed on her when he came to drink and drink and drink. She preferred the nights that ended with cop cars to the nights that ended with her having to smack him back to consciousness and that brief bleary eyed pain that he couldn’t hide. 

She threw him out ever time. She didn’t need to know his pain- hers was enough, thank you very much.

Chad would call her at three am his time and she would let it go to voicemail. 

She imagined that he was lying in his bed staring at the ceiling of his perfect New England life. She imagined that he would hold his phone and stare at her name before just closing his eyes and swallowing his pride. She secretly loved that he would call. She secretly loved that he wasn’t so proud to beg.

She hated that there was a part of her that hated her mom for getting sick.

“Please,” he’d whisper on the nights when she’d pick up. She’d close her eyes and listen to the crackle on the line, learning what the dark sounded like on the other side of the country. It sounded like him breathing. It sounded the same as the dark they’d shared here.

Maria DeLuca smoked weed. She drank too much. She swung her arms out when she danced and let the music slide through her. She let people paint her into the idea of who she really was. She took care of her mother and didn’t let herself think of blond hair and blue eyes. She let herself enjoy the feel of a bed to herself. She let herself be kissed by another man, his toothpaste different on his teeth. She let herself fuck an let herself grow. She was the girl who stayed. 

Someone had to.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a lyric from the original version of Torn by a band called EdnaSwap and I highly recommend the listen. 
> 
> Come flail with me [here.](http://irolltwenties.tumblr.com)That would be rad.


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